Since the beginning of the modern computer era, computers have largely been focused on one thing: computing with numbers. Yes, we have had word processors, email applications, and search engines available to us to work on textual information. But in these cases, for those programs, the language of humans is just a collection of words and punctuation, and words are just characters and symbols—in other words, just numbers to the computer.
One of the great breakthroughs that artificial intelligence (AI) has brought us is its ability to create a stronger recognition of what people mean when they say things in their own natural language. We call this natural language understanding (NLU).
In this chapter, we will explain the Watson Natural Language Understanding service, along with the Watson Knowledge Studio tool that is used to...